Sunday read.

Building culture in a remote team is hard. I've been making notes from founders who did it well.

Here a few great ones👇 1/ Record a private team podcast - @nathanbarry

Interview every new hire "about their life story for a private internal podcast."

Record it and save it on a shared database.

Anyone can listen to it and know enough to connect with the person.

Sunday read

If you want to learn how to win in a commoditized market, Liquid Death is THE playbook.

• It sells water in a beer can

• Valuation: $700M

• On track to do $250M/yr in revenue

Here's how it used branding to become the fastest-growing beverage of all time: 1/ Unique positioning

If you're selling a product as commoditized as water, it will have nearly 0 differentiation.

So, instead of selling the water’s quality, Liquid Death makes water sound exciting, dangerous, and weird through marketing.

(h/t Business Booth YT)

Sunday read.

Been researching products/services available only for billionaires.

Some of them I didn't even know existed: Pet cloning

Multi-millionaires clone their dying pets (dogs, cats, horses, etc.).

They trade their rare artwork or priced cars for the service.

But there are also companies like Viagen who do this for $100K+.

Slack ex-CEO explains overhiring I've heard that phrase a lot

https://twitter.com/molson_hart/status/1665860350728626179

Hiring corporate executives for a startup is a bad idea.

I can't share stories from founders I know, but here are similar ones: 1/ A founder on Reddit shares how 2 executives almost killed their startup

Why is everyone so hooked on Duolingo?

Here is the reason people keep coming back to using the app: Duolingo has 550M users that generate $400M annual rev.

Octalysis framework helped them grow user retention from 12% to 60%

It's a gamification design framework that lays down 8 core human motivations you can exploit to build an engaging user experience.

Here is the breakdown:

Sunday read.

There's a founder who makes ~$3M/yr with 0 employees.

• 12M visits/month
• Users spend 1.5M hrs/month using it
• 90% of revenue comes from ads

Here's how he built and operates the business alone: @ivankutskir (🇺🇦 founder 😍), while still at college, launched a website to display PSD files on GitHub

Users loved it, and based on their feedback, he iterated it into a photo editor @photopeacom

The best thing, he's grown it this much without any sales & marketing team.

We are going to invest in Programmatic SEO.

I was inspired by a few cases. Let’s talk about Zapier.

Here’s how they’ve built a $5B business on the back of programmatic SEO: What is programmatic SEO?

You create 1000s of pages of unique content to target high-intent, low-volume keywords.

With this tactic, Zapier:
• Created 70K+ landing pages
• Filled each one with unique content (without writing themselves)
• Got 8M backlinks

Here is how:

Sunday read.

This is hilarious. Engineers are competing who creates the worst UI on Reddit.

I think the winners are:

1/ Enter your phone number 2/ Good luck deleting your account

Notion has built a $10B business on the back of community-led growth.

• 1M+ global community members
• 25M+ users
• $60M+ ARR

Here is their exact strategy: 1/ The template funnel

In 2019, @benln joined Notion as the Head of Community. He first built the template directory for users to create & share templates.

Two benefits:
1. The more templates created, the more value existing users get.
2. 👇

Sunday read.

Been rounding up Reddit posts where ex-employees reveal “company secrets.” Here are some crazy ones:

1/ “Glassdoor removes job reviews and lets employers choose which ones get shown first!” 2/ Checked this one myself and got a discount on a mower last week:

“Home Depot employees can give $49.99 off any item without it flagging for approval.

Department heads can do $99.99.
Assistant store managers can do ~249.99.
Store manager ~499.99.”

Masterclass has built a $2.5B business on the back of one SEO tactic.

They use the power of "second-order questions" to drive free traffic to their site.

Here is how they do it 🧵 1/ The Masterclass website got ~12m visits in March w/ 65% of traffic coming via organic search.

Top 3 highest bug bounties were paid by crypto companies.

The rest of the big tech is surprisingly cheap.

I went down the rabbit hole and found the top 10: 10/

United paid a 19-year-old 1m miles for reporting 20 security flaws.

1000000 miles is $12k. This is what they pay KPMG to open their email.

Not a big tech, but come on.

VCs will tell you: "Don't do it"

These founders didn't listen and outsourced their engineering. Now they are worth billions.

10 stories that will surprise you: 1/ Calendly is a well-known but my favorite story.

In 2013, @TopeAwotona outsourced the MVP to Ukrainian developers.

He stayed with the team (throughout the revolution and the start of the war in 2014), and they shipped.

Today:
• 10M users
• $100M/yr rev
• $3B valuation

Did you know there are religious institutions worth $10B-$100B?

• making more revenue than 70% of startups
• owning a million dollars worth of lands/stocks
• contributing $1.2T of economic value in the US alone (as of 2016)

Here are a few examples that will surprise you: 1/ The Mormon Church (credit to @thesamparr @ShaanVP)

Established in 1830, it has ~17M global members, donating 10% of their annual income.

Plus:
• It has a $100B+ hedge fund, which owns $40B+ of US stocks & 2% of all the land in Florida
• It made $8M+ on the GameStop squeeze

Early-stage companies shouldn’t need to spend big $$ on lawyers for basic documents.

Here are the templates every startup can use: 1/I used and will always use Stripe Atlas for company creation. For $500, they do everything, and it’s magic.

If you prefer to do it yourself, you’ll need corporate formation docs and the founder's stock purchase agreements.

• tinyurl.com/3tren2xx
• tinyurl.com/2etv4xwb

Amazon has built a $1 Trillion empire with this one hack:

Turning cost centers into profit centers.

But they are not alone.

Here are 8 companies that have converted their expenses into revenue: 1/ Let's start with Amazon itself.

Cost center: Infrastructure costs
Profit center: AWS

• In 2006, Amazon started offering its cloud services to other businesses.
• Today, it has a 32% market share & generates $80B+/yr in revenue.

The debate over VC vs. bootstrap rages on Twitter.

Here are 10 examples where same products achieved big results either way: 1/ Investing app

@RobinhoodApp: Raised $6.2B (valued at $9B)
Users: 23M
Revenue: $1.3B/yr
Loss: $1.03B/yr

@zerodhaonline: 0 funding (valued at $4-5B)
Users: 11M
Revenue: $700M+/yr
Profit: $250M/yr

There's a $4B startup that:

• raised 0 funding
• spends 0 on marketing (11M users came organically)
• If today revenue goes to 0, it will still have 13 yrs of runway 🤯

Here's a story you never heard of: @zerodhaonline is a stockbroker allowing you to trade & invest in the Indian stock market

Founders are brothers @Nithin0dha & @nikhilkamathcio

Stats are crazy:
• 20% of market share
• $750M/yr in rev, $250M in profit

How did they grow so large without funding or marketing?

How many billion dollar companies do you know 100% owned by one person?

I went down the rabbit hole and found the 10 most impressive ones: 1/ Fashion Nova owned by @richardsaghian (valued at ~$2B)

• It's a fast-fashion retail store (the site gets 30M visits/mo)

• Revenue: $1B+/yr

• In 2018, it was the most-searched fashion brand in the US

Here's @jspujji with its growth story:

https://twitter.com/14879002/status/1504874794897981442

As I’ve taken over our marketing, I’m researching different strategies.

One of the best lead gen magnets - free tools.

A few companies that mastered this tactic: 1/ Shopify created over 20 free tools.

Examples:
• business name generator
• logo maker
• burst

Here's how much monthly traffic its tools generate (h/t @SumoMe)